AMD Radeon HD 6490M

The AMD Radeon HD 6490M (sometimes also still called ATI Mobility Radeon HD 6490) is a laptop graphics card for entry level to middle class notebooks. It is based on the Seymore-XT chip and therefore features the UVD 3 video decoder. Compared to the slower HD 6470M, the 6490M offers optional fast GDDR5 graphics memory. The GDDR5 versions are clocked with 700 ord 750MHz, the DDR3 version features a higher 800MHz core clock, but should be slower due to the slower graphics memory.

The 120 Stream processors should be still based on the "old" 5D architecture similar to the 5000 series. Therefore, the number of shaders is not comparable to the 1D cores of current Nvidia GPUs. The Tessellation performance should be improved (like the desktop 6800 series) with the new cards. The Stream processors can be used with DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.1, DirectCompute 11 and OpenCL. With the later two the cores can also be used for general computations like transcoding videos.

The performance of the higher clocked GDDR5 version is about on a level of the Mobility Radeon HD 550v / GeForce GT 325M. Therefore, the card is positioned in the lower middle class and allows to play current games in medium detail and resolution settings. In our tests with a 15" MBP modern games like Starcraft 2 or Mafia 2 reached about 30fps in medium detail settings with a resolution of 1024x768. Less demanding and older games like Trackmania also ran in high details and resolution settings. Detailed benchmark results can be seen at the bottom of this page.

The new UVD3 video decoder supports the decoding of MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, VC-1, MPEG-2, Flash and now also Multi-View Codec (MVC) and MPEG-4 part 2 (DivX, xVid) HD videos on the graphics card.

- Range of benchmark values for this graphics card - Average benchmark values for this graphics card

Game Benchmarks

The following benchmarks stem from our benchmarks of review laptops. The performance depends on the used graphics memory, clock rate, processor, system settings, drivers, and operating systems. So the results don't have to be representative for all laptops with this GPU. For detailled information on the benchmark results, click on the fps number.